The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 16, 2011

Official News page 8


REAL LIFE NEWS: DON'T FILE YOUR EMAILS

by Hazed

Once you've had an email account for any length of time you have hundreds or even thousands of emails that you might want to refer to again in the future. The problem is, how do you organize them to ensure you can always find the specific email you are looking for?

It turns out that the best strategy may well be: don't bother. A study has concluded that filing emails into separate folders within your email program is a waste of time. People who just use the search function to find what they were looking for could find relevant emails much faster than those who had carefully filed the mail into categories.

IBM Research examined 345 users' email habits and checked how long it took them to find a specified email. Using searches, it took on average 17 seconds, whereas looking in folders took 58 seconds. The likelihood of success was no greater when everything was neatly filed away.

So the time spent each day carefully filing the emails into their relevant folders really is a load of time wasted.

You can read more about this study here.

In case you are interested, I simply have one email filing folder for old mail, into which everything goes once I've dealt with it - leaving my inbox clear for unread mail or things I haven't finished with yet. That works for me.


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